The inhumane conditions of
Bradley Manning's detention
15 December 2010
Reuters/Jonathon Burch/AP/Salon
By
Glenn Greenwald
(updated below)
Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S.
Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has
never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite
that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia
for five months -- and for two months before that in a military jail in
Kuwait -- under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment
and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with
several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning's
detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian
Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the
accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create
long-term psychological injuries.
Since his arrest in May, Manning has been
a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary
problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a "Maximum
Custody Detainee," the highest and most repressive level of military
detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane
measures imposed on him.
From the beginning of his detention,
Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of
24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits
completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are
heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under
constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that
appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic
attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets
for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the
one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from
accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested
that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown
into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement,
entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken
out.
In
sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to
inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing
conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America's Supermax
prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been
convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to
warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now
administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his
brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.
Just by itself, the type of prolonged
solitary confinement to which Manning has been subjected for many months
is widely viewed around the world as highly injurious, inhumane,
punitive, and arguably even a form of torture. In his widely praised
March, 2009 New Yorker article -- entitled "Is Long-Term
Solitary Confinement Torture?" -- the surgeon and journalist Atul
Gawande assembled expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate
that, as he put it, "all human beings experience isolation as
torture." By itself, prolonged solitary confinement routinely
destroys a person’s mind and drives them into insanity. A March, 2010
article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the
Law
explains that "solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to
withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can
be as clinically distressing as physical torture."
For that reason, many Western nations --
and even some
non-Western nations notorious for human rights abuses -- refuse to
employ prolonged solitary confinement except in the most extreme cases
of prisoner violence. "It’s an awful thing, solitary," John McCain
wrote of his experience in isolated confinement in Vietnam. “It crushes
your spirit." As Gawande documented: "A U.S. military study of almost a
hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam .
. . reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous
and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered." Gawande
explained that America’s application of this form of torture to its own
citizens is what spawned the torture regime which President Obama vowed
to end:
This past year, both the Republican
and the Democratic Presidential candidates came out firmly for
banning torture and closing the facility in Guantánamo Bay, where
hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation.
Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the
question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture. . . .
This is the dark side of American
exceptionalism. . . . Our willingness to discard these standards for
American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions
prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the
detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same
way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized
segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is
no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary
confinement . . . .
It's one thing to impose such punitive,
barbaric measures on convicts who have proven to be violent when around
other prisoners; at the Supermax in Florence, inmates convicted of the
most heinous crimes and who pose a threat to prison order and the safety
of others are subjected to worse treatment than what Manning
experiences. But it's another thing entirely to impose such conditions
on individuals, like Manning, who have been convicted of nothing and
have never demonstrated an iota of physical threat or disorder.
In 2006, a bipartisan National Commission
on America's Prisons was created and it called for the elimination of
prolonged solitary confinement.
Its Report documented that conditions whereby "prisoners end up
locked in their cells 23 hours a day, every day. . . is so severe that
people end up completely isolated, living in what can only be
described as torturous conditions." The Report documented
numerous psychiatric studies of individuals held in prolonged isolation
which demonstrate "a constellation of symptoms that includes
overwhelming anxiety, confusion and hallucination, and sudden violent
and self-destructive outbursts." The above-referenced article from the
Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
states: "Psychological effects can include anxiety, depression, anger,
cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, obsessive thoughts,
paranoia, and psychosis."
When one exacerbates the harms of
prolonged isolation with the other deprivations to which Manning is
being subjected, long-term psychiatric and even physical impairment is
likely. Gawande documents that "EEG studies going back to the
nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners
after a week or more of solitary confinement." Medical
tests conducted in 1992 on Yugoslavian prisoners subjected to an average
of six months of isolation -- roughly the amount to which Manning has
now been subjected -- "revealed brain abnormalities months
afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had
endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or,
yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the
human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic
injury." Gawande's article is filled with horrifying stories of
individuals subjected to isolation similar to or even less enduring than
Manning's who have succumbed to extreme long-term psychological
breakdown.
Manning is barred from communicating with
any reporters, even indirectly, so nothing he has said can be quoted
here. But David House, a 23-year-old MIT researcher who befriended
Manning after his detention (and then
had his laptops, camera and cellphone seized by Homeland Security
when entering the U.S.) is one of the few people to have visited Manning
several times at Quantico. He describes palpable changes in Manning's
physical appearance and behavior just over the course of the several
months that he's been visiting him. Like most individuals held in
severe isolation, Manning sleeps much of the day, is particularly
frustrated by the petty, vindictive denial of a pillow or sheets, and
suffers from less and less outdoor time as part of his one-hour daily
removal from his cage.
This is why the conditions under which
Manning is being detained were once recognized in the U.S. -- and are
still recognized in many Western nations -- as not only cruel and
inhumane, but torture. More than a century ago, U.S. courts understood
that solitary confinement was a barbaric punishment that severely harmed
the mental and physical health of those subjected to it. The Supreme
Court's 1890
decision in In re Medley noted that as a result of solitary
confinement as practiced in the early days of the United States, many
"prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a
semi-fatuous condition . . . and others became violently insane; others
still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better . . .
[often] did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any
subsequent service to the community." And in its 1940
decision in Chambers v. Florida, the Court characterized
prolonged solitary confinement as "torture" and compared it to "[t]he
rack, the thumbscrew, [and] the wheel."
The inhumane treatment of Manning may
have international implications as well. There are
multiple proceedings now pending in the European Union Human Rights
Court, brought by "War on Terror" detainees contesting their extradition
to the U.S. on the ground that the conditions under which they likely
will be held -- particularly prolonged solitary confinement -- violate
the European Convention on Human Rights, which (along with the
Convention Against Torture) bars EU states from extraditing anyone to
any nation where there is a real risk of inhumane and degrading
treatment. The European Court of Human Rights has in the past found
detention conditions violative of those rights (in Bulgaria) where "the
[detainee] spent 23 hours a day alone in his cell; had limited
interaction with other prisoners; and was only allowed two visits per
month." From the Journal article referenced above:
International treaty bodies and human
rights experts, including the Human Rights Committee, the Committee
against Torture, and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, have
concluded that solitary confinement may amount to cruel,
inhuman, or degrading treatment in violation of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the
Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading
Treatment or Punishment. They have specifically criticized supermax
confinement in the United States because of the mental suffering it
inflicts.
Subjecting a detainee like Manning to
this level of prolonged cruel and inhumane detention can thus jeopardize
the ability of the U.S. to secure extradition for other prisoners, as
these conditions are viewed in much of the civilized world as barbaric.
Moreover, because Manning holds dual American and U.K. citizenship (his
mother is British), it is possible for British agencies and human rights
organizations to assert his consular rights against these oppressive
conditions. At least some preliminary efforts are underway in Britain
to explore that mechanism as a means of securing more humane treatment
for Manning. Whatever else is true, all of this illustrates what a
profound departure from international norms is the treatment to which
the U.S. Government is subjecting him.
* * * * *
The plight of Manning has largely been
overshadowed by the intense media fixation on WikiLeaks, so it's worth
underscoring what it is that he's accused of doing and what he said in
his own reputed words about these acts. If one believes the
authenticity of the
highly edited chat logs of Manning's online conversations with Adrian
Lamo that have been released by Wired (that magazine
inexcusably continues to conceal large portions of those logs), Manning
clearly believed that he was a whistle-blower acting with the noblest of
motives, and probably was exactly that. If, for instance, he really is
the leaker of the Apache helicopter attack video -- a video which
sparked very rare and much-needed realization about the visceral truth
of what American wars actually entail -- as well as the war and
diplomatic cables revealing
substantial
government
deceit,
brutality,
illegality and
corruption, then he's quite similar to Daniel Ellsberg. Indeed,
Ellsberg himself said the very same thing about Manning in June
on Democracy Now in explaining why he considers the Army
Private to be a "hero":
The fact is that what Lamo
reports Manning is saying has a very familiar and persuasive ring to
me. He reports Manning as having said that what he had
read and what he was passing on were horrible -- evidence of
horrible machinations by the US backdoor dealings throughout the
Middle East and, in many cases, as he put it, almost crimes. And let
me guess that -- he’s not a lawyer, but I'll guess that what looked
to him like crimes are crimes, that he was putting out. We know that
he put out, or at least it's very plausible that he put out, the
videos that he claimed to Lamo. And that's enough to go on to get
them interested in pursuing both him and the other.
And so, what it comes down, to me, is
-- and I say throwing caution to the winds here -- is that what I've
heard so far of Assange and Manning -- and I haven't met either of
them -- is that they are two new heroes of mine.
To see why that's so, just recall some of
what Manning purportedly said about why he chose to leak, at least as
reflected in the edited chat logs published by Wired:
Lamo: what's your
endgame plan, then?. . .
Manning: well, it
was forwarded to [WikiLeaks] - and god knows what happens now -
hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms - if
not, than [sic] we're doomed - as a species - i will officially give
up on the society we have if nothing happens - the reaction to the
video gave me immense hope; CNN's iReport was overwhelmed;
Twitter exploded - people who saw, knew there was something wrong .
. . Washington Post sat on the video… David Finkel acquired a copy
while embedded out here. . . . - i want people to see the
truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you
cannot make informed decisions as a public.
if i knew then, what i knew now -
kind of thing, or maybe im just young, naive, and stupid . . . im
hoping for the former - it cant be the latter - because if it is…
were fucking screwed (as a society) - and i dont want to believe
that we’re screwed.
Manning described the incident which
first made him seriously question the U.S. Government: when he was
instructed to work on the case of Iraqi "insurgents" who had been
detained for distributing so-called "insurgent" literature which, when
Manning had it translated, turned out to be nothing more than "a
scholarly critique against PM Maliki":
i had an interpreter read it for me…
and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled
"Where did the money go?" and following the corruption trail within
the PM’s cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to
the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any
of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs
in finding *MORE* detainees…
i had always questioned the things
worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a
point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in
something that i was completely against…
And Manning explained why he never
considered the thought of selling this classified information to a
foreign nation for substantial profit or even just secretly transmitting
it to foreign powers, as he easily could have done:
Manning: i mean what
if i were someone more malicious- i could've sold to russia or
china, and made bank?
Lamo: why didn’t
you?
Manning: because
it's public data
Lamo: i mean, the
cables
Manning: it belongs
in the public domain -information should be free - it belongs in the
public domain - because another state would just take advantage of
the information… try and get some edge - if its out in the open… it
should be a public good.
That's a whistleblower in the purest and
most noble form: discovering government secrets of criminal and corrupt
acts and then publicizing them to the world not for profit, not to give
other nations an edge, but to trigger "worldwide discussion, debates,
and reforms." Given how much Manning has been demonized -- at the same
time that he's been rendered silent by the ban on his communication with
any media -- it's worthwhile to keep all of that in mind.
But ultimately, what one thinks of
Manning's alleged acts is irrelevant to the issue here. The U.S. ought
at least to abide by minimal standards of humane treatment in how it
detains him. That's true for every prisoner, at all times. But
departures from such standards are particularly egregious where, as
here, the detainee has merely been accused, but never convicted,
of wrongdoing. These inhumane conditions make a mockery of Barack
Obama's repeated pledge to end detainee abuse and torture, as prolonged
isolation -- exacerbated by these other deprivations -- is at least as
damaging, as violative of international legal standards, and almost as
reviled around the world, as the waterboard, hypothermia and other
Bush-era tactics that caused so much controversy.
What all of this achieves is clear.
Having it known that the U.S. could and would disappear people at will
to "black sites," assassinate them with unseen drones, imprison them for
years without a shred of due process even while
knowing they were
innocent, torture them mercilessly, and in general acts as a lawless
and rogue imperial power created a climate of severe intimidation and
fear. Who would want to challenge the U.S. Government in any way --
even in legitimate ways -- knowing that it could and would engage in
such lawless, violent conduct without any restraints or repercussions?
That is plainly what is going on here.
Anyone remotely affiliated with WikiLeaks, including American
citizens (and plenty of other government critics), has their property
seized and communications stored at the border without so much as a
warrant. Julian Assange -- despite never having been charged with, let
alone convicted of, any crime -- has now spent more than a week in
solitary confinement with severe restrictions under
what his lawyer calls "Dickensian conditions." But Bradley Manning
has suffered much worse, and not for a week, but for seven months, with
no end in sight. If you became aware of secret information revealing
serious wrongdoing, deceit and/or criminality on the part of the U.S.
Government, would you -- knowing that you could and likely would be
imprisoned under these kinds of repressive, torturous conditions for
months on end without so much as a trial: just locked
away by yourself 23 hours a day without recourse -- be willing to expose
it? That's the climate of fear and intimidation which these inhumane
detention conditions are intended to create.
* * * * *
Those wishing to contribute to Bradley
Manning's defense fund
can do so here. All of those means are reputable, but everyone
should carefully read the various options presented in order to decide
which one seems best.
UPDATE: I was
contacted by Lt. Villiard, who claims there is one factual inaccuracy in
what I wrote: specifically, he claims that Manning is not restricted
from accessing news or current events during the prescribed time he is
permitted to watch television. That is squarely inconsistent with
reports from those with first-hand knowledge of Manning's detention, but
it's a fairly minor dispute in the scheme of things.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/14/manning/index.html
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